Quillen leaving VPA board before privatization decision

Mike Quillen, a coal executive who has led the Virginia Port Authority board since July 2011, is leaving the panel in January before it decides whether to privatize the management of the state's terminals.

Quillen, a down-to-earth businessman who has used humor to defuse some of the more tense discussions relating port privatization, had agreed to stay on at the VPA until early next year.

When the state laid out a schedule for the board to choose whether to tap a private operator to replace Virginia International Terminals, commissioners voted to temporarily extend Quillen's term on the board, on which he's served for the past decade.

But the schedule has been extended after criticism that Gov. Bob McDonnell's office was trying to rush the decision-making process.

Quillen, who lives in Bristol and who was recently appointed as a rector at Virginia Tech, said Wednesday that "I just can't keep doing both."

"I've served my 10 years and my 100,000 miles travelling back and forth, and it's been a full time job the last two years," he said in a phone interview.

Quillen is the only board member McDonnell kept when he replaced the other 11 appointees in the summer of 2011. Quillen was then made chairman.

He said that though he would have ideally seen the board through the at times contentious privatization process, the extension of the schedule made that impossible.

"The thing is going to go well into 2013. If it was finished by January, I could hold on a bit."

He said the board is well-positioned to make a decision in his absence.

"The new board has been serving a year and a half and they're certainly very competent."

Quillen said the issue of his replacement as chair should be on the agenda for the board's meeting later this month.